Marshall McLuhan’s ideas on the media and mass culture were incredibly influential

Who was Marshall McLuhan and what were his big ideas?

Herbert Marshall McLuhan was born in July 1911 in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and died on December 31, 1980.

He was a professor, philosopher, intellectual and writer and has influenced everything from journalism to advertising to the arts.

After writing The Mechanical Bride, a critique of the world of advertising, and The Gutenberg Galaxy, which laid out how printing changed Western civilisation, he published Understanding Media.

The book deals with technology and media and how it affects the way people think.

His famous phrase “the medium is the message” means the way we try to convey a message influences the way any message is understood – and in some ways is more important than the message itself.

For example, a TV news report about a horrifying crime may be less about the news story itself than the way the news report affects how the public perceives crime because it has been brought into their home via TV.

Did Marshal McLuhan predict the internet?

Almost 30 years before the internet was born, his book The Gutenberg Galaxy prophesied the web technology seen today.

He wrote: “The next medium, whatever it is—it may be the extension of consciousness—will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form.

“A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organisation, retrieve the individual’s encyclopedic function and flip into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind.”

What is a Google doodle?

In 1998, the search engine founders Larry and Sergey drew a stick figure behind the second ‘o’ of Google as a message to say they were out of office at the Burning Man festival and with that, Google Doodles were born.

The company decided that they should decorate the logo to mark cultural moments and it soon became clear that users really enjoyed the change to the Google homepage.

In that same year, a turkey was added to Thanksgiving and two pumpkins appeared as the ‘o’s for Halloween the following year.

Now, there is a full team of doodlers, illustrators, graphic designers, animators and classically trained artists who help create what you see on those days.